Many artificial lures are known which are designed to represent one of the foods which fish naturally feed on, and fish are attracted to the lure in the belief that it is a natural food.
A number of prior fishing lures are specifically designed to visually resemble the natural food of the hunted fish. In order to give the visual appearance of the natural food, many artificial lures are simply synthetic replicas of the natural food (such as flies, worms, small fish, etc.) of the hunted fish. Ammerman's lure (U.S. Pat. No. 2,235,600), a molded rubber "fish", is an example of such a lure. Other prior devices accomplish this visual resemblance to a natural food by using photographs of the bait food. Schellenberg (U.S. Pat. No. 4,803,793) and Lilley (U.S. Pat. No. 3,528,189), for example, disclose fishing lures having actual photographs of the bait fish manufactured into the lure. In still other prior devices, whole natural fish are used to provide a visual resemblance to a live food. Nevison (U.S. Pat. No. 2,169,811) and Rae (U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,269), for example, disclose lures in which the entire bait fish is actually cast into a solid transparent material in order to visually expose the bait fish to the hunted fish.
All of such prior lures have limitations as to their effectiveness due to the fact that hunted fish usually do not strike at bait solely because the motionless bait, per se, has the same visual characteristics as a particular animal specie.
For instance, in some cases fish appear to rely on their sense of smell to locate and/or discriminate between potential foods. Davis (U.S. Pat. No. 2,791,056), Biskup (U.S. Pat. No. 4,637,160) and Ammerman (U.S. Pat. No. 2,235,600) disclose examples of semi-artificial lures in which a portion of meat from a natural food of the hunted fish is attached to, or inserted into, the lure in order to provide a scented attraction to a live fish.
All of such prior lures have limitations, because compromises have been made between the visual similarity of those lures with the natural food, and the amount of actual natural food which is used. Generally speaking, in such prior devices, the more the lure "looks" like the natural food, the less it "smells" like the natural food.
Another problem of such prior lures, which rely either on the scent or the visual appearance of the lure in order to attract the live fish, is that many fish also rely on the motion, vibration, or sound of a bait in discriminating between potential foods.
It is well known that the effectiveness of a particularly shaped or configured fishing lure depends, among other things, on the identity of the fish being hunted. Depending on the particular fish being hunted, for example, it may be preferable for a lure to be one color rather than another; or it may be preferable to have the lure skim along the surface of the water rather than sink to a lower depth; or it may be preferable for the lure to make vibrating noises rather than be silent; or it may be preferable for the lure to "swim" in small undulations rather than straight; or it may be preferable for the lure to emit a light rather than not; or it may be preferable for the lure to emit a scent rather than not. A problem of all of the prior lures which are substantially constructed of natural fish foods is that none such prior device can be readily modified for hunting fish (of different species) with the aforementioned sensory stimulants.